Zero To A Hundred – Episode 8: Crafting The Perfect Customer Journey With Sarah Hosman!

Zero to a Hundred | Sarah Hosman | Customer Journey

 

Hey Accelerators! 🚀 In this episode, we dive deep with Sarah Hosman, co-founder of Long Ship Systems, to uncover the secrets to creating an incredible customer journey that drives growth and profitability. If you’re looking to refine your messaging, master CRM systems, and design a sales funnel that converts, this episode is a must-listen! 💡

🔹What’s on the Menu:

  • How to structure the ideal customer journey for your business. 🔄
  • Optimizing CRM systems to enhance customer engagement. 📈
  • Building a sales funnel that turns leads into loyal customers. 🛠️

🔥Why Tune In?

  • Sarah shares actionable strategies on how to tailor your customer experience to maximize satisfaction and drive long-term growth. Whether you’re a startup or an established business, these insights will help you create a seamless journey that keeps customers coming back.

💬 Gem from Sarah: “Your story is the key to building a connection—customers need to see themselves in it.”

📞Get in Touch with Sarah:

🌐 Longshipsystems.com | Scheduling: longshipsystems.com/why-schedule

URL: https://thecrew.longshipsystems.com/

Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s accelerate your business from zero to a hundred! 💥

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Crafting The Perfect Customer Journey With Sarah Hosman!

I am very excited to welcome our guest Sarah Hosman, who is the co-founder of Longship Systems and specializes in creating that incredible customer journey for the right customer. We’re going to cover some topics that are going to be crucial to the growth and profitability of your business like creating the right messaging and customer journey, CRM systems, the elusive sales funnels, and telling the founder’s story.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jarrod Guy Randolph. I am the Founder of BoxFi. We are a business growth solution through payment processing. I’m so excited to share the network that we’ve created over several years in my 25 years of entrepreneurial experience to help you grow your business and be more profitable. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s accelerate together.

Sarah, it is wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me, Jarrod. I appreciate it.

Customer Journey

We’re going to give our accelerators a crash course in some key topics, all the way from the customer journey, talking about CRMs, text and email marketing, how to do it appropriately, and some other good tidbits that are going to help them create more profitability in their business. We’re super excited to have you. Let’s start first by talking about the customer journey because we hear this a lot when we’re talking to the gurus in marketing or watching a clip on YouTube and you should be doing X, Y, and Z. Talk to me about how to create the right customer journey for your right client.

Some of the things that I always bring up with clients are the should-do, what they need to do, and what’s the right way. It varies so much, depending on a lot of different factors. Here’s what I can tell you. That has been my experience over the last eight years. First and foremost, you want to think about your customer journey in three main formats. You want to think about the marketing side. You want to think about your customer journey from the sales perspective, and then you want to think about your customer journey from the fulfillment perspective.

I like to delineate all of my journeys into those categories, and there are additional ones I’ll put in there. There’s the finance category, as well as the internal perspective and your hiring processes. We’re not going to worry about those because that can get a little bit squirrely with some additional things. As far as your customer journey, I like to start over on that fulfillment side. I like to play a little game in my head. This is what I do with every single client when I’m first talking to them.

Let’s play a game of imagination. I want you to pretend that you are a restaurant. I’m walking in. All of your services or your products are on a menu. What’s on the menu? What can we buy right now? From there when we understand those products, then it makes working backward into that sales side. Two main questions I always say. There are only two types of businesses. There’s the type that I have to talk to you to give you my money. The second one is I can purchase directly.

Those are two different types of companies and two different types of sales pipeline processes, then we work backward into, what’s going to be some of our best marketing mechanisms to better engage based on the pipeline that we have and the products that we’re selling. That would be one of the big things that I see. People don’t break it up. They’d like to think that their customer journey is from the very first time anybody’s ever seen you, all the way to them being the lifelong customer. Ultimately, that is the journey but without breaking it up, it’s too big to focus on.

How To Approach Customers

Let’s talk about how we bifurcate that journey and I’m going to be frankly self-serving because it’s a good example. For my fintech company, our payment processing, we have two key products that we all offer then we have sub-products that we offer. The two key products are one is an interchange-plus model, where it’s whatever the interchanges for credit cards plus and percentage. We have the dual pricing model which gives the customer a choice to pay with a credit card and cover the convenience fee of using that credit card, or they are paying with cash and they’re not paying any fees. The merchants no longer paying the fee.

Those are two products. The sub-products are software, hardware, POS systems, and things like that. It seems they are two distinctly different products, but they’re either reducing or eliminating your credit card fees. How would I approach my customers if I wanted to create the right journey because there are two distinctly different customers? I want to completely eliminate the B and one is like, “I have good margins and I want to reduce my fee a little bit.” How would I look and approach that?

You would do it based on the product that it is and work backward even though it technically may answer a lot of the questions similarly in your approach and how you say it. When we’re looking at the customer journey, there are three major touch points. The first one is going to be in your tools and your technology. It’s going to be the automation and that linear customer journey, or how that looks. That’s one area.

The second area is supercritical. It’s the content. How we talk to those people is going to be vastly different. Even though we may be using the same tool to communicate with them. With both customers, I may have a similar pipeline structure. I may even be using let’s say a fourteen-day free trial or something like that as my marketing component.

My sales component may look the same for both people. Product fulfillment and onboarding may be similar as well. They just have different things that they’re going to do. Either way, though, how we’re talking to them in each of those stages is vastly different. Even though our car looks the same. It’s all a car but maybe we have a BMW or pick your American car. I’m so bad with cars, so that’s a terrible analogy for me.

Volkswagen and BMWs. We can compare them. It’s like having a 4-liter engine and having an 8-liter engine. You’re marketing to two different consumers. One might be more environmentally and gas conscious. The other one might be all about the performance of the car. This is super important that you’ve brought up from the silo of how you are marketing the product. Is it strictly the content or marketing the right product to the right client? How do you layer in creating that irresistible offer that helps you stand out from the crowd? How do you create that for each one of your product offerings?

I’m going to make almost a two-fold type of answer here because there are two different layers to this. I talked about how we have the automation and the tools and how we then have what we’re saying to them. The third and critical piece of that is the strategy that you’re using. I’m going to use another analogy. That strategy that’s a lot closer to my heart. I have three children. I’m in business with my husband. It’s very exciting, but on any given night, if we’re all hungry, we’re going to go into the kitchen because we are starving and it’s time to eat.

I have a go-to meal. If I’ve got nothing else, I know that I always have these ingredients. I know this recipe backward and forts. It is a spaghetti. My children love it. It works easy. When it comes to strategy, what we’re doing is we’re finding the recipe that consistently works for that product and for that client’s journey. What I like to help people find is I want to find spaghetti for that product. What is our fastest to cash that creates our longest-term wins and is easily replicable over and over where we can keep that consistent?

What are those ingredients that we can pull in that I know I can always have on hand to pull from? I’ve been able to do this with a few different clients. Once you hit gold, it does make life super easy. It’s not that you’re hitting gold and that every single win is always a million dollars. It’s always this and that. It’s that it’s replicable and we can get that turned out quickly and easily.

One of my favorite books by Gary Keller is The ONE Thing. It’s the one thing that makes everything else in your life or business easier or obsolete. Business owners need to be able to focus on that one product or that one offering where they can do exactly what you said. It’s the fastest to cash. Over the long term, it has the most wins and it is replicable. That could be your restaurant. It’s your go-to signature dish that everybody comes in for or it could be a retail product where that’s the perfect fitting jeans and everyone buys or you could be an SEO company.

It is the leading product or service that you sell that increases the cashflow of that particular business because they’re drawing more traffic into the website. As a business owner, you must be able to define what that one thing is and it can be your go-to whether your business is doing well or things are slow in your business and it gets you back on track.

Highlighting what you said there, this is something that I’ve seen over and over. A lot of businesses want to be able to do everything so that they can meet every single customer every single time in every single way. Whoever could possibly ever be their ideal customer, that’s who they’d like to hit. I can’t think of anybody who’s been able to be everything to everybody and always attract everything.

When we niche in and find our one thing or our special sauce, then that’s your right customer every time. You will never go wrong. It’s one of the things I feel like we’ve nailed in with our business. I have a few hard and fast rules. I get through them quickly in a call and I assess fast whether or not we want to do business with that person. If they don’t meet the criteria, I know that even if they could pay me the money or they could pay triple what I normally would, they are not my ideal client. It does still have success but it won’t be a win-win for us, for them, and for their team.

This is the concept around Zero to a Hundred. Sometimes you need to slow down to accelerate. Take for instance Amazon. Amazon started selling books because they saw that there was a major opportunity within that particular industry and they branched into any and everything else beyond. Like them or lump them, they are one of the biggest case studies.

I’d love for you to talk about this because this is beyond the technical aspects of it. It’s more of the psychological aspects of it. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Who are you trying to help? What I’ve realized in my business because I’ve been challenged by one of my board members to say, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? What I’m doing is working with business owners to save as much money as they possibly can so their businesses are profitable. I want to make as much money as I possibly can doing it.

The making of the money allows me to reinvest in my business, grow my platform, make my product offering way better for my customers, and be able to have BoxFi 2.0 or BoxFi 3.0 and grow into the fintech platform that we want to grow into and invest in ourselves. It becomes this cycle. If you’re not able to define who you are as a business, what customer you’re serving, and why, it doesn’t need to be this long drawn-out explanation of what you’re doing. I want to help businesses make as much money as they possibly can. I want to make as much money as I possibly can doing it.

This is sometimes where I know, in talking with a business, whether or not we align and whether or not they’re going to be truly the biggest success that I can help them with. That is in that goal. What’s your mission here? First of all, if I’m getting an overly verbose answer on that, I am almost always a little bit leery about it. You should be able to say this in five words. Let’s get it out. What’s your one-second pitch?

The other one that gets me is when it’s, “I don’t know. We just want to make a lot of money.” We’re probably not going to be aligned because if you don’t care about the experience of your employees, yourself, and your clients, then we don’t have anywhere to go because money isn’t going to buy happiness. It’ll buy a lot of good things though.

It’ll help you get in that direction. The why though is, why do you want to help businesses make as much money as possible, Jarrod? If I’m using myself as an example. I want to support small businesses of the backbone of America. Number one, there are 33 million of them. They employ 51% of the total employed people in the US and they have a 46% impact on the GDP.

By definition, small businesses are the largest industry in the United States of America. Hands down, period. I don’t feel like they have enough support. I don’t feel like they have the resources. I want to put as much money in their pockets as possible to keep them moving forward. As a company, I want to make as much money as I possibly can but be careful what that language. Listen very carefully to what I’m saying in terms of why I want to make as much money as I possibly can.

This is the why. That allows me to reinvest in my business so I can be better for my clients. That’s one of the reasons why I want businesses to make more money so they can renovate their spaces. They can hire that employee that they need to hire. They can spin that extra $4,000 a month on Google advertising which is going to drive their traffic an additional 15% to 20% on a monthly basis.

It all comes down to, how we get to a point of increase in our profitability so we can continue to do what we love and service the people, whether it’s feeding people at a restaurant or it is providing clothing for people at a retail store. We have to be profitable to get there. That’s one of the most important things. Defining that why is going to help create that path for you to have a great marketing funnel. Create a message and put content out that’s going to be impactful for your consumers where they go, “I want to work with her, I want to work with him, I want to do business with them.”

Truly, being a leader is setting a vision for what it is you want. It’s getting others to buy in on how great the world can be and moving people forward in that. I love that. Finding your why is mission-critical. I would challenge almost anybody when they say, “We want to sell as much as possible.” That isn’t your only why. That’s not the only reason you got into it. You got into it because there was some passion behind it. Let’s talk through that and let’s figure that out. It is one of the things we work through with a lot of people because they don’t know how to say it yet.

The Founder’s Journey

While we’re still on this topic of the customer journey, this is all critical to defining what that customer journey is. What is the importance of the founder’s journey or the founder’s story in selling a product or service?

I don’t want to only save this to the end. I’m going to tell you your audience. I’m going to give you guys an opt-in. It’s called Three Critical Campaigns Every Business Needs. One of them is what I call new lead indoctrination. It sounds culty because it is. We want to indoctrinate and teach our leads why they should know, like, and trust us and why they should buy into our vision of the world. As a business owner, it is very critical for you to share that origin story.

I differentiate how the story is told. First of all, there’s one where we’re telling the special mechanism that gets people into how you’ve arrived at your why. There’s also your origin story of how you came to even want to understand what your why was. We do a few different exercises with our clients to help them better define that. Your story is a very critical part of anything, especially in that messaging.

People need to be able to see themselves in your story. How it’s told is very important, but understanding why you’ve arrived here and the mechanism that helped give you either your first breakthrough or the breakthrough the most significant to your ideal avatar or your ideal client.

People need to be able to see themselves in your story. Share on X

Conceptually over the last several years, that has been a new idea that I’ve had to embrace. My background is in real estate. I’ve been in real estate for 25 years. We sold a product and it was about the product. We got clients because we had great relationships. We did a lot of investor sales. We did large development condominiums with half a billion dollar sell out. We always had a volume of business but it was always about the product and moving into what I’ve realized now, which is truly a service-based business.

It is about the customer but they want to know why they should work with you. This highlights what you said. It felt very disingenuous and self-serving. I was like, “I don’t want to tell my story because I don’t feel like anyone wants to hear it.” I’ve realized and this is for the audience, now the more I tell my story, they go, “I get it,” and then they start sharing theirs.

Mine, why I got in the payment processing as a fluke seven years ago was because I had a business in 2015 that failed. It was an existing business that I purchased and lost a ton of money on and had to fire a ton of employees. It sucked. I was at a stage of my life where I never should have bought the business without the right capital and without the right team members. I went back and I did an audit about six months later to figure out what happened. It was my lack of resources and resourcefulness. One of them being financial.

It came down to there were some expenses that if I understood how to manage at the time I could have reduced or eliminated it. It would have saved me. Payment processing is one of them about $140,000 a year. Those were the two salaries that I needed to hire the operations manager in the marketing person to keep the business going to operate the business. When I realized, it’s like, “Why didn’t I know this going in?” It was frustrating for me, but therein lay the opportunity. It’s for me to help other business owners so they never get in the position that I was in as a business owner and have to close the doors and lose a ton of money because that investment didn’t work out.

To some of your point of, “I don’t want to tell my story again,” that is something because we’ve heard it so many times and we lived it, where we are almost gag. Everybody does it. We all do it. That’s totally normal. It’s like, “Nobody wants to hear from me again.” Maybe but I don’t know. I don’t know everybody’s situation. Maybe, but I doubt it. I seriously doubt it and they haven’t heard it ad nauseam. They didn’t live it with you.

Therefore, they are going through it. I think about all of the things as you were going through that. If you had heard somebody else’s story midway through, might that have also made a big difference in your journey and what could have happened there? I would almost say it does because when we’re in a moment of turmoil and we hear that thing that grips us, now I’m paying attention. I have now an emotional connection to why I should listen. Not just a financial one and a business transaction. Think about it, when we very first met, first of all, we knew we instantly had to be friends because we are almost the exact opposites of each other. You’re very tall and very big. I am a tiny little pocket human.

I could hold you upside down by your feet like a marlin.

We have that picture to prove that is what happened. That’s a real thing. He held me up by my feet like I was a fish. In our very first conversation, you and I got in deep right away with what our backstories were, how we arrived at the event where we had met, and how we arrived at running our businesses. That was within 30 minutes of us meeting each other and getting to know each other.

Your story is super critical because it’s that human connection. You still need to think about your client journey, even if it’s online and you’re not meeting face-to-face. Even if you’re not meeting in person, you’re still having a conversation. You want to understand where your clients at. Part of the way that you’re going to understand it is by communicating your story to them.

Your story is super critical because it's that human connection. Share on X

Not parallel that humanity and this is important for business owners. It’s to bring humanity into your personal story. It might seem like it is irrelevant but it’s not. Whether you’re an attorney, a dentist, or someone selling courses online, people want to know your backstory because you become that much more relatable. If you are a dad and you love four willing and fishing with your son every single weekend, do you know who’s going to relate to you? Other dads who do activities with their sons. Especially, if they fish or four-wheel with them, they’re going to want to do business with you because then you have that commonality, and share your founder story.

It doesn’t have to be this overly dramatic story. It has to be like, “This is a matter of fact. This is what I’m doing. This is what happened. It’s exceeded it failed whatever it is. It’s why I am doing what I’m doing and providing the product or service I’m providing for you to make your life better.” That’s the value-add. They start to have that direct connection with the brand.

If you were to take brands in the marketplace because we don’t have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets. If you were to take brands in the marketplace who you think have done a good job with their customer journey and telling that story. Who would those brands be that business owners could look at and say, “I can extrapolate something from there and use it towards creating my brand story and my customer journey?”

A lot of times, when people speak with marketers at large. I’m going to use a very broad term there. Marketers at large often want to equate things to some of the big brands that you can look to. What I would say is a lot of small businesses, you’re not Nike. You’re not. Maybe someday you will be Nike, but maybe you don’t want to be Nike either.

When I talk about brands, I would tell you to look at other small businesses. One of my clients teaches a course on how to buy and trade in cryptocurrency. They have a proprietary method that they’ve worked that helps people cashflow in and out of cryptocurrency. They do an excellent job of communicating their story and who they are to people. They came to me and said, “We have this cool idea. We want to do this five-day-long master class and challenge and teach people what we can do. We want it to be two hours every day for these five days. We want to do it live.”

I almost discouraged them at first from doing this. These are clients of mine that I worked with for quite a while. I was like, “I don’t know, guys. That seems like an awful lot. We could probably communicate this in twenty minutes in a video recording. How about we do that?” They’re like, “No, we want this. We want the live communication.” They are so set on this. I said, “Let’s do it.” They were selling and they still sell $20,000 memberships into their Mastermind group out of these week-long challenges.

Now, my gut instinct said, “That sounds like a lot of work for you. I don’t know that you’re going to be able to do it.” It’s because, over that time, they learn over and over different aspects of each owner’s story. They start relating to different ones. They’re able to tell their story in that entire week in several different ways and at different points so they can meet these 200 people at where they’re at and where they are going to see themselves.

Funnels

Go with me on this because what you said is critical. It’s the ability to tell that story over a long period of time or an elongated period of time. Let’s talk about the top of the funnel when you were trying to make that client aware. We won’t go into the different levels of awareness and everything. Let’s just talk about the top funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom funnel. Would you consider this a top-of-funnel activity for this group or is this a mid-funnel activity?

This is mid to bottom. Top of the funnel, these guys have a very successful podcast that they run already that is geared towards more of an advanced crypto trader. Somebody who’s been in the market. They can drive people to other episodes and to different things like that. That would be considered the top of the funnel. At any of the ads that they’re running, that’s all top of the funnel. Anything where it goes from an ad into the maybe initial opt-in like a video or something like that. That’s all considered top-of-the-funnel efforts.

This would technically be the middle of the funnel. People are running from the ad and they’re watching a video then they have to sign up for this. They do pay $7. One of the things that I will tell you is if you’re going to start running ads, I would consider having people pay a small amount for something of high value. They’re going to be spending a week with these people. That’s a very high value that you’re getting for the $7. Great.
If you're going to start running ads, definitely consider having people pay a small amount for something of high value. Share on X

They have several of their offers that people could take advantage of like A VIP package or amonthly group where they talk about mindset type of things. They have a beginner course and a safety course, how to be safe. As we all know, crypto is a risky thing. That’s a good course for them to have. Smart. They have that running and those funnels produce what they’re going to produce. During that recording, I would almost tell you, that week that they’re doing the master class, give the top of the funnel. Let’s imagine it there and then we’ve got the middle of the funnel.

Once it starts, we start to move into that bottom-of-the-funnel realm. Anybody who’s bottom of the funnel is anybody who’s going to say yes to hopping on a consultation call. They have some requirements to get on the consultation call. That would be considered then the bottom of the funnel. I would say the funnel ends for most people once real money exchanges hands. Meaning they’re going to join your program from there. These smaller programs don’t say money is in exchanging hands and then they’re not clients, but they are still technically in the funnel.

It’s selling the product that you’re trying to sell. That’s when the bottom of the funnel, you’re closing the business. It’s not the teasers. It’s selling that ultimate product, whatever it may be for your business that gets them to the bottom of the funnel.

It gets them into the end product that you want them in. Their goal is not to sell and it’s fine. If your goal is to sell 100,000 online courses where you don’t have to talk to anybody, that’s fine, but that is a separate type of funnel from these people. Their avatar is somebody who wants to work with them in their Mastermind group. They aren’t looking for the person who just wants to do all of their own research and wants to go at their own pace or anything like that. They’re looking for people who are ready to make money now with crypto.

CRM

What we’ve covered and this is one of the other key components. We talked about creating that customer journey and telling your story within that customer journey to be able to attract that right customer for the right product that you’re selling to them and then how they get fed into the funnel, that top-of-funnel, mid-funnel, and then how you turn them into a client or customer. Long-term management is going to be key for those relationships no matter where they are in the funnel. What is the importance and how do you get the most value out of putting a CRM into place? How should business owners, whether you’re a restaurant or you are a clothing shop, how should you be looking at implementing a proper CRM into your business to make your business more profitable?

Ultimately, we’re all consumers of something but as business owners, we are still consumers. We’re consumers of the things that make our business better, more profitable, and easier. As consumers, sometimes we forget and we take off the business owner hat and we put on the consumer hat. We’re like, “Look at all of these things I could do,” without stopping to think, “Should you do them or do you want to do them?”

Ultimately, we're all consumers of something. As business owners, we are still consumers of the things that make our business better, more profitable, and easier. Share on X

You have to look at these things and think, “Should I implement this thing? Do I want to?” I’m going to use an example. People always want an opt-in funnel of some sort and I want to run ads. I’m not saying that’s the wrong move for anybody. That very likely could be your best move. However, are you sure that you need some opt-in funnel? People get very stuck on what to say, how to say it, and what to do for that.

It can often become a real sticking point for people in their journey. The same thing goes with tools. I’ve got to have it where it updates this Google sheet. I can find you the tools that will update your Google sheet for you, but do you want to be living out of a spreadsheet? Is that what we wanted to do? Is that the best thing that’s going to get you to growth and scalability? My guess is probably not.

Will I still implement the thing you’re asking me to implement? Of course. I’m not going to call it stupid either because it may not be stupid. It’s usually something that gives people a level of security in their business. It certainly is not stupid, but it may not be the thing that you want to get you the growth that you’re looking for.

It might be very specific to each type of industry and business owner. Are there maybe two CRM tools that you think check the majority of the boxes that any business owner could use and implement?

I’m going to give you the one that I will tell you I recommend, 90% of the time, when I’m talking with somebody, they are either working in a CRM called Go High Level. When Go High Level very first came out, they were not marketing themselves as a CRM. It was because they were looking to be a competitor to ClickFunnels, Leadpages, and these other funnel-building types of systems.

They started taking some very good cues from companies like HubSpot and Infusionsoft. Keap is an ActiveCampaign. Even MailChimp where they started pulling in features that people liked. The other thing that they started doing is they started offering courses very similar to the course builders inside of Kajabi, but they were so much simpler than say a Memberium or one of these other membership types of profile.

I have previously been very leery of any company that says, “We provided an all-in-one solution.” What I’ve seen happen more times than not is that all-in-one solution, you never do anything well. I’m not going to call out this a major chain restaurant with a very large menu of things. They claim that they do it all. I would tell you they do one thing. Their desert is very well.

Are they cake desserts?

You’re getting closer there. It’s like maybe an assembly line. A factory, if you will. We can all start to pick up on what this may be. Do you want to be of the CRM world? I had previously thought, “No, you probably don’t want to be.” I would tell you though that they’ve proved me wrong. I’ve been watching them for a long time. I’ve been implementing for clients and it’s a tool that we’ve found very successful for a lot of people.

I do not care for Keap’s email deliverability but Keap has the best small business logic and CRM logic. They have a very nice customizable customer record that is very convenient. It is cumbersome to use. I would tell you if you’re not going to have somebody who can own that process or you’re not going to hire a third-party company like my company to implement it, you will have a very large learning curve. You will have less of a learning curve inside of Go High Level than you would in a product like Keap. Other products are very good, but it does depend on the type of business. We stay platform agnostic at built-in every conceivable CRM. Those are the two that work well for people.

Rapid Fire

What we covered which has been incredibly informational and fruitful for the audience is that customer journey, telling your story, figuring out that one thing that works for your business, and growing from there. That top-of-funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom-funnel experience and what that should look like and could look like for success and then touched on CRMs, which I believe every single business mom-and-pop pizza shop.

Maybe a retailer needs to have to be able to stay in constant contact with their customers and continue to push their brand out as much as they possibly can. Incredibly informative. We’re going to go to the next phase which is our little rapid-fire section. You have to give me quick and fast answers to these questions that you don’t know what they are. Who wins in a fight, Barbie or My Little Pony?

My Little Pony.

If you’re in a zombie apocalypse, what weapon do you grab before you run out of the house?

Gun.

Favorite book or favorite business book?

Who Not How.

If you could have dinner tonight with anyone in the world, dead or alive, who would it be?

Benjamin Franklin.

What do you disagree with the most in your industry?

Bad advice that’s out of context.

If you are a small business owner who’s doing $10 million in annual revenue and Jarrod walks through the front door and hands you a $300,000 check, how would you advise them to invest that into their business to double their profits in the next twelve months?

I wouldn’t invest all of it in this but I would spend some time on the fulfillment side of your client journey. Make sure that once somebody is in your system as a customer, you are hitting them at every possible point and maximizing those. I would get that dialed in. I see that contributes the most to long-term success.

Last but not least, what is the biggest thing that you had to overcome in your business to become a success?

Myself.

That seems to be a common thread. How did you overcome yourself?

I had to get out of my own way and realize that I was very good at messaging and design. I was very good at that part of it, but other people on the team were better at the logic, the tool building, and the strategy than I was. The quicker I learned to niche in at what I was good at, the happier I became and the happier our clients became.

That concludes our three-hour tour. Miss Sarah, I appreciate you being with us. Please tell our audience and our accelerators where they can get in contact with you.

You can always go to my scheduling page. It also has a nice little video that talks about it. That’s LongshipSystems.com/why-schedule. For the audience, if you would like to get a copy and templates, this includes email templates as well as campaign structure and workflow structure for my three critical campaigns. The three critical campaigns I think every business needs to be successful. For those three campaigns, I will outline them all and that’ll be in LongshipSystems.com/3criticalcampaigns.

Sarah, those are invaluable. Thank you for that gift to the audience. We look forward to having you again.

Thank you.

 

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About Sarah Hosman

Zero to a Hundred | Sarah Hosman | Customer JourneyMeet Sarah, Co-Founder of LongShip Systems – the driving force behind helping successful businesses streamline and supercharge their customer journeys.

Sarah along with her husband, Clint, have cracked the code on how to transform the often chaotic and time-consuming process of managing marketing, sales, and fulfillment into a seamless, automated machine.

At LongShip Systems, they deliver results by integrating three powerful pillars:

Automation and Systems: From marketing to sales, fulfillment, and internal processes, Sarah’s expertise helps businesses eliminate the manual grind and achieve consistent results at scale.
Sales-Driven Copy & Creative Content Strategy: Through the power of StoryBrand and strategic content, Sarah guides businesses in crafting messaging that not only resonates but converts.

Advertising & Retargeting: With the right targeting, Sarah helps businesses not just reach their audience but keep them engaged and coming back for more.
Sarah’s passion is understanding the unique challenges that business owners face and turning those challenges into opportunities for growth. She believes that every business has an ideal customer journey, and with the right systems in place, achieving that vision is within reach.